Jonathan Lethem on OBAA

[J Tracy]

Powerful review with many persuasive points . I am not so enraptured with Perfidia as Lethem; she loses sympathy when she murders the black bank guard and betrays her own comrades, all to play sexual  power games and save her skin. Summoning the panthers into today's world rings false. There is no revolutionary parallel to the 60s  that happened 16 years ago apart from the far more subtle Occupy movement which was non-violent direct action pointed at the prevailing  global economic and bi-partisan political trend rather than a police state war such as was planned by Reagan and now continues with no regard for the American constitution by Trump.  One could make the argument that all revolutions will spill innocent blood, but Perfidia is exposed as not so deeply motivated by those commitments.  If she came back on the scene it would be as an older, wiser , and very contrite presence. Her return in the form of the letter is less persuasive than Frenesi, who actually goes to Humboldt. Perfidia’s letter is Hollywood schmaltz about how much she loves her daughter. In Hollywood love is a feeling, often located in the groin, or rooted in sentimental manipulation which is what the letter is.. In real life  love is what you do, and she doesn’t do shit for her daughter. 

Not doing shit in the face of a global militarized police state supporting genocide and racist criminalization of the many  refugees from wars, US supported narco states and climate crisis  is the whole problem . University presidents submitting to fascist restrictions on speech and inviting the police state to invade their campuses reveals the transactional nature of a corrupt and gutless academia.  The revolutionary pursuit of freedom and self government is gone not just from both parties, it seems to have been simply a convenient  ruse that the ruling class has grown tired of trying to sustain. 

Back to the movie. Leaving Zionists out of the ruling inner elite is gutless and dishonest. . From JJ Angleton’s love for Israel, to the Neocons to L Fink,  Adelson and  Larry Ellison US zionists have been at the epicenter of global power, black ops included. And putting anglo white supremacy as the decision making basis is dishonest also, How did Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, Clarence Thomas  or B Obama get power and work smoothly with the deep state war machine? It’s a cartoon, at best , and in my view  a politically convenient lie.

Is it funny to watch Lockjaw Penn gassed and incinerated because  his faithful murderous slavishness to the Club is tainted by sex with a black woman?  Maybe, kinda, sorta, in a movie, I mean  it’s fairly  entertaining to see John Bolton, who never missed an opportunity to betray another human get nabbed by the people he worked for… though a gas chamber would seem extreme for a sycophantic fake patriot bozo. Is this scene supposed to suggest that these neo fascists will eat each other, so just stay tuned? Is the answer to kill Lockjaw, kill The dude in the yellow car, blow up the Christmas Club HQ,  Bomb the Trump ballroom while he is there.  Does anyone belive that will end the pursuit of full specrum global dominance of the Empire of coups, collective punishment and stupefying bi partisan support for starvation and genocide.  If there is a violent revolution in the US it will be awful, and reveal how rampant fascism is. It will be forced upon us not for some secret participation in liberating  Ice facilities( though I can certainly sympathoize with that). It will be forced upon us by the widespread paranoia of those whose identies are as tied to guns and US supremacism as Israel is to Zionist supremacy.  Unfortunately this movie is as addicted to the mythos of violence as the US government and people are, or the death to arabs chanters in Israel..  

I agree with Lethem’s take on Di Capprio as an actor but also liked how his relationship with his daughter redefines family in both an ancient Christian communitarian  way and in a progressive modern redefinition,  not blood but love, practical care, fearless resistance to threat. I  particulalry llike his focus on Del Toro’s role which was my favorite part of the movie.. The thing about the Sensei Sergio's revolutionary underground railroad and mutual aid community is that he bears more resemblence to subcommandante Marcos in Chiapas  and the Zapatistas than to an identifiable movement in the US other than a handful of radical Catholic and other activists  in Chicago ,LA , and mexican border areas. Unfortunately  most people won’t get that. The other thing I lked about the movie was the role that cell phones,computers and other forms of surveillance play in today’s world and how extremely hard they make it to orchestrate effective resistance to a surveillance state gone rogue. Perhaps Chiapas, Colombia, Bolivia  and Cuba are as good a model for local freedom and a cooperative future as anything out there. My time remaining  on this earth is short. I pray for a better future for my children and theirs, I do not see that future in either US party and have not for many years. IMO OBAA is too caricatured, too full of cliches and too willing to duck the role of Zionism in today’s authoritarian violence to accomplish anything important as a work of art, like VL or other Pynchon books did for many of us.. It gets enough right to set up strong expectations and sympathies but  lacks a center strong enough  to force an internal reckoning.

> On Oct 31, 2025, at 11:06 AM, j e l <ssnomes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> from The New York Review:
> 
> https://archive.ph/lp740
> 
> Frantic Realism
> 
> [Jonathan Lethem]
> 
> Paul Thomas Anderson fits a generation’s worth of cineplex joys into One
> Battle After Another, but the revolution refuses to get off the couch.
> 
> November 20, 2025 issue
> 
> Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland features a distinctive running joke in
> which titles of Hollywood films are marked with the years of their release:
> “They were talking about Return of the Jedi (1983), parts of which had been
> filmed in the area.” This holds even when a title is mentioned in dialogue,
> by a character who can hardly be expected to have cared to cite the year of
> a given film’s release, or even to know it:
> 
> “Let me guess—2001: A Space Odyssey [1968].”
> “Try 20,000 Years in Sing Sing [1933].”
> 
> The suggestion may be that Pynchon’s sentences occupy both a novel and a
> film studies text. His books are drenched in cinematic nods both high and
> low; dude loves going to the movies. He may live there. But the whiff of
> scholarly apparatus reminds us of another trait we may safely impute to our
> elusive hero: Pynchon haunts the archives. He knows the dates of things.
> This specificity entrenches his conspiratorial Looney Tunes in hidden
> histories and secret causalities.
> 
> Pynchon also apparently wastes his time between books watching what he
> calls “the Tube,” revealed in an avalanche of references to The Mod Squad,
> Hill Street Blues, and Gilligan’s Island; David Foster Wallace complained
> in a letter that Vineland read as if Pynchon had “spent 20 years smoking
> pot and watching TV.” Is it revealing that the TV shows mentioned in that
> novel don’t get their years appended to them? A kind of qualitative fire
> wall between cinema and mere television is a typical mid-twentieth-century
> bias. Films are regarded as glamorous, possibly an art form; television, an
> invader squatting in our homes to replace the book, the hearth, the
> babysitter, and the family piano, is squalid and disposable. To grow
> addicted to it is to become a solitary tippler, a day drinker. Nowhere is
> this bias more evident than in the medium of film itself. All That Heaven
> Allows (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Network (1976), The Truman Show
> (1998), and Requiem for a Dream (2000) variously offer the senior medium’s
> warnings about the evils of the junior.
> 
> For my generation—Paul Thomas Anderson’s, approximately—the distinction is
> less clear. By the time I was a latchkey kid flipping channels, I wallowed
> not only in I Love Lucy reruns but in old films recycled as filler for
> local broadcast. My first experience of the Godfather cycle was when in
> 1977 Francis Ford Coppola, to suit the late-1970s craze for prestige
> miniseries, recut the first two films into Mario Puzo’s The Godfather: A
> Novel for Television, an event for which we crowded onto my friend Joel’s
> parents’ bed for four successive nights. And, of course, there were the
> yearly ritual viewings of West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz. I saw much
> of Hitchcock first on WNET, alongside MacNeil/Lehrer, I, Claudius, and
> Monty Python. Meanwhile, movie stars had shipwrecked onto TV—Groucho,
> Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Tony Randall.
> 
> Anderson had an unusual vantage on the taming of the big screen to the
> small: his father, the disc jockey and announcer Ernie Anderson, served
> from 1963 to 1966 as “Ghoulardi,” the horror film host on a local Cleveland
> television station. His father’s run as host was finished before Anderson
> could have seen it live, but the Ghoulardi legend—which inspired
> underground Ohio bands like Devo and Pere Ubu—was such that he attached
> Ghoulardi’s name to his production company, beginning with his second film,
> Boogie Nights (1997). That movie, which made Anderson famous, reworks the
> theme of one medium’s distaste for the next in its tale of a proud
> pornographic film industry on the verge of destruction by a flood of
> cheaply produced videos. The story recapitulates, in a satirical key, film
> culture’s tendency to self-mourn. Think of Gloria Swanson in Sunset
> Boulevard, bemoaning the loss of silent film: “We didn’t need dialogue, we
> had faces!” Subsequent travesties include the partition of movie palaces
> into multiplexes; interventions like colorization and pan-and-scan
> and—needless to say—the rollout of television and the ever-yet-smaller
> screens that have followed.
> 
> Anderson’s curiosity about new media halts at television; he has skirted
> any portrayal of characters’ use of the Internet, most often by setting his
> films decisively in a precomputer past. A devotion to celluloid has
> culminated in Anderson’s revival of the nearly lost VistaVision process for
> his newest film, One Battle After Another. Like Cinerama, CinemaScope, 3D,
> and Smell-O-Vision, VistaVision was introduced to lure postwar filmgoers
> back into theaters for unique experiences unrivaled by the television
> screen. Many notable English-language directors of Anderson’s
> generation—Kelly Reichardt, Lynne Ramsay, Andrew Bujalski, Sofia Coppola,
> Jonathan Glazer—have dallied with digital or video cameras, and with them,
> smaller production footprints. Even among those who expressly connect their
> work to the classical studio-era style—think of Todd Haynes, with his
> reverence for Douglas Sirk—there may be variations from the model: newer
> cameras, occasional television series, or features for streaming. (The same
> has been true of some of the older directors, like Robert Altman, Francis
> Ford Coppola, and Michael Mann.) Anderson, then, dwells in a purist aerie,
> with only the more fetishistic Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino (the
> latter has called digital projection systems the “death of cinema” and
> “television in public”) for cover.
> 
> Without commanding a popular audience the size of Tarantino’s or, like Wes
> Anderson, inspiring museum exhibitions and coffee table books (and endless
> parodies) because of the peculiar inventions of his style, P.T. Anderson
> has for many been accorded a loose status as “arguably the preeminent
> Hollywood filmmaker of his generation.”1  For my part, already amazed by
> Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), I began holding my breath at word
> of each new Anderson release after the experience of There Will Be Blood
> (2007). I liked the next, The Master (2012), even better. Anderson has at
> times resuscitated my faith that genuinely big films, new ones, might still
> fulfill their terms with subtlety, wit, and verve.
> 
> Vineland is set firmly in 1984, at the doorstep of Reagan’s second term.
> Much of the book consists of flashbacks to his characters’ participation in
> a late-1960s and early-1970s revolutionary left; within these come further
> flashbacks, to equally grounded accounts of earlier twentieth-century
> politics: Wobblies, McCarthyite purges, the blacklist. In One Battle After
> Another, Anderson has delivered a free adaptation of Pynchon’s wistful
> book, one that is at once “updated” for our times and unmoored from any
> literal history. The film appears to take place, somehow, in two different
> renditions of a loose “now,” renditions bridged by a sixteen-year gap
> (during which an infant grows to be a teenager). Critics have already tried
> to secure a timeline based on the makes of cars and the legends on
> T-shirts, but the film floats loose of chronology. Perhaps its later scenes
> are set in some version of the future? At the same time, the result has
> been widely acclaimed for its thrilling currency, its outrageous, supersize
> relevance. Has the director here overthrown his typical
> preference—unmistakable and beguiling—for the past? Or is something
> stranger going on?
> 
> Perhaps the times can bring themselves to meet a given work of art.
> Anderson has remarked that he’d been fooling with an adaptation of
> Pynchon’s book for twenty years, but it seems unlikely that his early
> conception of the project included extensive depictions of militarized mass
> deportations (not a subject in the novel). One Battle After Another,
> prepared and shot before Trump’s reelection, is something more than
> prescient; it seems to have won an existential gamble, on a high and
> devastating level, in staging scenes of a US invasion of its own cities,
> scenes in which officials with guns occupy high schools and hospitals, all
> under an official pretext originating in a corrupt and insane commander’s
> personal vendetta. And at a time when the onset of contemporary fascism has
> reached such brazenness that it openly shops for a Reichstag fire to call
> its own, we watch a scene of troops confronting street protesters and
> creating a false flag Molotov cocktail attack on their own barricades in
> order to justify fighting “fire with fire.”
> 
> The concurrences galvanize our attention to an uncanny degree. It is as
> though the director had flowed his vision out of the tiny nightmare reels
> and risible memes we lately find on our phones and directly into the
> massive and collective sensorium of a first-run movie theater. Anderson’s
> alternative present has been embodied by famous actors working with a
> commitment and invention that match the movie’s psychedelically rich visual
> texture, accompanied by a soundtrack by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood
> (Anderson’s regular collaborator since There Will Be Blood), a soundtrack
> set to nervous-system overdrive, offering a wave of sonic panic you ride
> inside with delight.
> 
> A further piece of serendipity was even more specific, and perhaps more
> awkward: Assata Shakur, a permanent fugitive from US justice, died
> twenty-four hours before the film was released. The life of Shakur, a
> member of the Black Liberation Army and the godmother of the rapper Tupac
> Shakur, echoes that of the protagonist of the film’s first forty-minute
> section, Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. Though her
> costars Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn may for many viewers be more
> familiar, Taylor is the eye of the storm, seizing the attention of the male
> leads while they are still unknown to each other and initiating the crises
> that will drive the story past the sixteen-year gap to its later calamities
> and rescues.
> 
> On first viewing, this long, hectic prelude is both exhilarating and
> uncomfortable—a challenge. Taylor’s character is provocatively hostile and
> absurdly sexualized, with an impulsiveness that seemingly overrides her
> political commitments. She makes a boyfriend out of DiCaprio’s Ghetto Pat,
> hapless bombing expert at the periphery of her revolutionary cadre, and
> juggles the malicious attentions of the white supremacist super-soldier
> Steven J. Lockjaw—Penn—by kindling in him a bewildering new erotic self. Of
> these two men, one is responsible for her pregnancy. The world requires
> revolution. At the crossroads of these pressures, and likely terrified at
> the possibility that Lockjaw is the father, Perfidia will run, abandoning
> the infant daughter to Pat’s care. The dialogue is fractured, breathless,
> and sloganeering, suggesting a film with too much on its mind to slow down
> and help the viewer make sense of it.
> 
> Even if one has never heard of Assata Shakur, the casting may set off
> alarms. In transplanting Black identity, and a Black radical family, into
> Pynchon’s plot, which centers on Frenesi Gates—a white, blue-eyed activist
> too aroused by men in uniform not to betray her principles and the members
> of her cell—Anderson has done something more than evoke US racial legacies.
> He has also forced us to recall that the Black Panthers viewed the Weather
> Underground, the real-life group whose actions and fates most resemble
> those of Anderson’s fictional French 75, as indulgent, undisciplined, and
> privileged—childish bomb throwers incapable of real organizing. There’s no
> mistaking the source for the French 75’s rhetoric and methodology; Anderson
> has titled his film after a Weather Underground statement published in New
> Left Notes in 1969, while a letter from Perfidia to her daughter, read
> aloud in the film’s closing moments, reproduces several lines from a former
> member’s “Letter from Underground” (as quoted in The Weather Underground, a
> 2002 documentary directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel 2).
> 
> I wondered whether Anderson had also been watching Robert Kramer’s Ice
> (1970), an anomalous no-budget masterwork featuring unknown and mostly
> untrained actors as revolutionaries in a near-future New York City.
> Kramer’s velocity, his roving interest and willingness to satirize his
> dissidents’ sexual foibles, as well as his vagueness about temporal
> setting, suggest a possible source. The reverberations, dislocations, and
> provocations of One Battle After Another’s opening generate ferocious
> energy; we wait to know whether they will generate meaning as well. For me,
> after two viewings, the first forty minutes seemed, however unclarified,
> however nerve-shredding, by far the best. They offered promises the film
> wasn’t ready to keep and made trouble it couldn’t sustain.
> 
> On the verge of the film’s leap across decades, Perfidia slips all the
> traps laid for her, making a desultory escape from the film. At this, for
> all the wild pleasures of the two hours that follow, the film about
> revolutionaries escapes with her. What we’re given instead is the most
> seductively complacent needle drop of Anderson’s career: Steely Dan’s
> “Dirty Work.” It announces the new film, the predominant film: a mash-up of
> a Gen X loser comedy and a kinetic and gritty chase movie, one suggesting
> that Anderson has folded Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Sam Peckinpah’s
> Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) into his kit of influences.
> Penn’s villain is a Brechtian marvel, a Frankenstein of lust, rage,
> masculinist conformity, racism, and deep terror, at the intersection of Dr.
> Strangelove and Pete Hegseth. Maybe even better is a new character
> introduced only after the break: Benicio del Toro as Sensei Sergio, a
> karate instructor who casually multitasks an underground railroad for
> persecuted migrants (or, as he calls it, his “little Latino Harriet Tubman
> situation”). Del Toro’s best scenes ignite the curiosity and wit of
> Anderson’s camera and cutting; they seem to self-invent like bebop, and
> almost rescue the movie. The amplitude, the riot and hoot, the tonal and
> vehicular swerves and collisions of One Battle After Another make for
> cineplex joy. It is only once out of the theater that we may sense that
> this frantic diversion has left its central material essentially
> unconfronted.
> 
> The problem doesn’t lie at the film’s edges, which sizzle with detail, but
> is instead a matter of what has been subtracted from its very center and
> what has been substituted. Nor does the fault lie with DiCaprio’s
> performance as the former Ghetto Pat, who has assumed a new underground
> identity as the long-suffering dedicated solo dad Bob Ferguson. A great
> physical comedian, DiCaprio shades Bob with incomprehension, remorse, and
> true charm, making the most of what he’s been given. Yet we’ve seen this
> stoner’s bathrobe before; it once belonged to the Dude in The Big Lebowski.
> That Bob is a cipher to himself is a pretty good joke, but not good enough
> to mask that the film has now met him in the same place. Anderson’s old
> method, of dropping a Candide-like innocent into a Machiavellian
> world—consider Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, Joaquin Phoenix in The
> Master and Inherent Vice (2014), or nearly any role he’s given to John C.
> Reilly—has betrayed him. We miss Teyana Taylor, and Perfidia Beverly Hills,
> too dearly. We miss her angers, her betrayals, her risks, which include the
> risk that the film in which she appears won’t be capable of explaining her
> to us any better than Pynchon managed to explain Frenesi Gates. (I’m pretty
> certain he didn’t.) The only thing we can’t abide is for it to quit trying.
> Quit trying is what it does.
> 
> This lapse, it seems to me, isn’t only thematic but formal—and material.
> Certain stories need to subtract characters in order to proceed: Charlotte
> Haze must die for Lolita to be orphaned into Humbert’s care; Dickie
> Greenleaf must be murdered so that Tom Ripley can impersonate him. Yet
> films call forth our somatic responses to actors; it has always seemed to
> me that Shelley Winters’s and Jude Law’s performances are too vital and
> funny for Stanley Kubrick’s and Anthony Minghella’s films not to be damaged
> by their exits from the scene. Conversely—perhaps unfairly—a tale made of
> sentences can allow a missing character, say a disloyal runaway terrorist
> mom, to go on existing even after she vanishes. If everyone goes on
> speaking and thinking about a character like Frenesi Gates, as everyone
> does in Vineland, then she still exists for us nearly on a par with those
> doing the thinking and speaking, since they are only made of sentences
> themselves.
> 
> The ending of One Battle After Another, which encourages us to
> sentimentalize this damaged family romance, is the worst of Anderson’s
> career—particularly mysterious given that he’s previously demonstrated a
> special gift for the Pynchonian nonending, one that solves nothing and
> throws an audience back into its own wondering. Instead Bob, that goof, is
> on the couch, learning to take a selfie. The future has been handed off,
> approximately, to his daughter, God help her. She’s off to participate in
> a… something…in Oakland. Their hearts have been healed by the transmission
> of a secret letter from Perfidia, the nearest the film comes to contending
> with its missing, mythic, monstrous center—too little, too late, too lame.
> The gist of the letter is that the bad mother concedes her role to the good
> father. Because the letter’s lines are partly borrowed from a real
> revolutionary document, the filmmaker has failed to notice that he’s
> rehashed the finale of Kramer vs. Kramer.
> 
> Ultimately, Bob’s decades of stoner fugue set him outside of time in such a
> way that this film, which may seem to flirt hard with the present, at last
> ghosts it. Sacred tokens of revolutionary desire, like Gil Scott-Heron’s
> “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” anchor Bob and his movie—for it
> turns out to be his movie—in a crate-digging sensibility, and seem to
> decorate a political nullity. As squalid and depressing as most cinematic
> depictions of the Internet tend to be, the online realm is painfully real
> in its influence on our present circumstance. How can it be that Pynchon’s
> thirty-five-year-old novel about fractured revolutionary solidarity seems
> to have more to say about the problem than Anderson’s update? Screen
> addiction in Vineland is a symptom of collective surrender to fascist
> repression: “Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us
> distracted, it’s what the Tube is for.” Anderson’s diffidence about
> uncinematic screens may help explain why this film so flatters the
> vicarious wish to be free of it—our present circumstance, I mean.
> 
> I’m not immune. I felt a delighted rush at glimpsing a few frames of Gillo
> Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which Bob screens for himself.
> Yet I fear the real Bobs—I know a few—have moved on to other diversions.
> Some of them have been dabbling, in their wounded innocence, in VHS tapes
> of the September 11 conspiracy thriller Loose Change (2005). Others are
> heavily online, lurking in forums where they wait for another drop from
> QAnon. The question raised by Scott-Heron’s anthem is this: If not
> televised, where will the revolution unfold? It is the question that ran
> away with Perfidia Beverly Hills.
> 
> The second time I went to see the movie, I took my fifteen-year-old son.
> Afterward we shared his excitement, and my reservations. “Politically it’s
> a little incoherent, don’t you think?” I asked. He shrugged his agreement
> but then added, “At least it takes some time to show the concentration
> camps.”
> 
> I liked that he used that term—the right term, it seems to me, one that
> doesn’t appear in the film. And perhaps this is enough. On one point, at
> least, Anderson and I are in perfect accord: the kids are all right.
> 
> But I do think that Bob should get off the couch.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l